US and Latin America
The ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya vowed to return to Honduras in an attempt to reclaim power. Zelaya was forced out of office and exiled to Costa Rica in a military coup d'etat.
There's a communiqué, issued by a popular front against the coup, saying that Battalion 316 is operating again.
Battalion 316. This goes back to the Reagan years with John Negroponte, who was ambassador to Honduras at the time. He was involved in organising the Honduran branch of the Iran-Contra war. And the Baltimore Sun ran a series of articles that made it quite clear that he was involved in the cover-up of a number of death squad executions, over a hundred disappearances, by Battalion 316.
Honduras was effectively an outpost of the United States' worst campaigns during the Cold War. They built a huge air base in Honduras and a training centre there for the Central Americans. The US has always felt it had a perfect right to do anything it wanted to do in Latin America. That was its backyard, and for the sake of better security it had a right to do as it pleased down there! President Barack Obama said that he doesn't want to return to the dark policies of the past.
We hope that Obama will be honest and do the right thing.
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